'Wish You Were Here' pays tribute to New York

Thirteen tracks into this mixed-bag benefit album, Loudon Wainwright III breaks hearts with a simple fact: "Now you have to take the A train/There's no more service on the C."

"No Sure Way" is an unadorned folk song about the way lives have changed since Sept. 11.

Veteran songsmith Wainwright takes you on a subway ride through a quotidian landscape tragically turned Dantesque. This A train rides under the river Styx, through the "closed ghost station" of Chambers Street, then exits you into an unlikely Elysian Fields: Chinatown.

It's a beautiful love song, an ode to a city forever identified with a heart symbol. A potpourri of musicians  some New Yorkers, some merely fans, but collectively as diverse as the entity they serenade  pour their hearts out on this tribute compiled by The Village Voice: Baaba Maal, Mekons, Cornershop, Sheila Chandra, etc.

Ex-Slit Ari Upp and her son Wilton rock steady with "Don't Say Nothing Bad About NY," a song that answers with attitude  and heart  those who criticized the city, back before it was un-P.C. to do so. But the tourists who now snap pictures at Ground Zero desecrate a graveyard, and miss the point. To understand New York then, now, and forever  you have to get on that A train.

 Knight-Ridder

"Never a Dull Moment," by Tommy Lee. MCA

The revenge of the '80s turns nasty with the release of two awful albums: one from an actual '80s relic who is more famous now in The National Enquirer than Billboard.

Consider Tommy Lee's latest. The second solo project from the ex-Motley Crue drummer is an already dated-sounding, lunkheaded rap-metal album (isn't that ill-advised genre over already?), overstuffed with reheated metal riffs and addle-brained lyrics  "Do what the (bleep) you want" is the motto espoused repeatedly, most egregiously on a misguided cover of David Bowie's "Fame."

"Never a Dull Moment"? Never a good moment, either.

 Knight-Ridder

"Alice" and "Blood Money," by Tom Waits. Anti

At 30-plus years and counting, Tom Waits' art could seem like carnival-sideshow shtick. His voice ranges from a weary growl to a guttural bark, and he uses unusual instruments  circus calliope, Stroh violin, pump organ  and odd rhythms, including the oompah of Brecht-Weill compositions and the woozy waltz of drunken lullabies.

But Waits writes amazingly evocative songs full of tenderness and humanity, full of narratives both concrete and surreal, full of musical surprises.

"Alice" and "Blood Money" contain songs written for avant-garde operas by Robert Wilson (respectively, "Alice," loosely about Lewis Carroll, and "Woyzeck," about a maddened soldier), and although recorded concurrently, they're different animals.

"Alice" is the quieter one, built upon strings  creaky violin, haunting cello  and piano. Nursery-rhyme images recur in tales of unsettling dreams and strange characters, such as the literally two-faced "Poor Edward."